<One>
The true dark ages of Europe are not the centuries after the fall of Rome,
but the millennia before its appearance as a belligerent republic on the
Italian peninsula. The megalithic Beaker People, who constructed major
standing stone temples and other geomantic structures along the northwest
coast of Europe at roughly the same time period as the rise of Egypt’s
Old Kingdom, left us little but the mute relics of archaeology. More survives
from the Celts, at least in the way of an oral tradition, but the subsequent
displacement of their culture by the Romans left us only a distorted view
of their spiritual beliefs.[1]

Even more shrouded in darkness are the cultures, such as the Etruscans,
which formed part of what was called Liguria by the Romans. This was a
somewhat broad region, from northern Italy along the Mediterranean coast
to the Pyrenées, composed of many non-Celtic tribes and federations
with a similar language and religious practices. From the archaeological
and linguistic evidence, the Ligurians appear to be descendents of a central
European Neolithic culture, not directly connected to the Beaker People
and the megalithic culture. They also attained a rather high degree of
cultural sophistication.[2]

In a linguistic sense, what we now call civilization spread across the
Mediterranean from east to west. The Neolithic cultures, for all their
complex astronomy and megalithic constructions, were pre-literate and
this caused their long slow decline and disappearance. A variant of a
hieroglyphic or ideographic depiction of language developed in the far
west of Europe, as it did the Middle East and in the northern valleys
of China, but by the 5th millennium BCE, it had disappeared.[3]
This lack of a written language was the primary reason for the darkness.
In the pictoglyphs of the Camonica valley of northern Italy and Switzerland,
we see the recapitulation of such a linguistic process, but many thousands
of years after, and therefore behind, the progress of other cultures to
the east.[4]

Semitic civilisation arrived with the Phoenicians in the middle of the
second millennium BCE and forced the Neolithic Ligurians into the Bronze
Age. Along with the trade goods and bronze weapons came a new idea, an
alphabetic script in which language could be transliterated. The Etruscans
adopted the idea for their now virtually indecipherable language, as did
the ancestors of the Romans and cultures as far a field as the isolated
Neolithic farmers on Malta. A written language allowed for vast advances
in culture, and the civilizations in the western Mediterranean started
on a long growth spurt that would reach its climax with the triumph of
Rome in the Third Punic War.[5]

It is of course to Rome that we are indebted for the very word and concept
of pagan. To the civic-minded Romans of the early republic, slaughtering
its way to power on the peninsula, a pagan was literally a “country
bumpkin” or rural person as opposed to one who lived in a city.
Their worship was not that of the civic priesthood, a fairly orderly affair
of tutelary deities and propitiation of natural forces, but that of "the
Old Time Religion," the ancient pre-literate nature worship surviving
as a folk, and therefore distinctly rural, tradition with both ecstatic
and shamanic elements.

This pagan tradition would have a long history; perhaps because of its
pre-literate, non-linguistic origin it survived from the dark ages of
the pre-Roman world on through both Empire and Christianity, only succumbing
at last to urbanization and industrialization in the 19th and
20th centuries. Charles Leland, in his Aradia[6],
stumbled on traces of its survival as Tuscan witchcraft in the 1890s and
as early as 1566 the ideographs of the Neolithic Camonians were featured
in the Arbatel of Magick where they were called the Olympic
spirits.[7] The ancient mythic structure,
and its shamanic techniques, survived because it connected directly to
the land and to nature, making it in the truest sense, pagan or of the
countryside.

The strega of Leland's Aradia and the sigils of the Arbatel
represent a minority and distinctly non-mainstream thread of the ancient
tradition’s survival. They survived by hiding and becoming occult.
In other places, the tradition survived by absorbing other influences
and adapting them into a truly popular culture. At times, this method
brought whole populations into conflict with the authorities, such as
the Church of Rome, and the pressure of time and politics produced a superficial
uniformity that allowed for the tradition’s survival only as a folk
memory.

But it did survive. And traces of it can still be found, sometimes in
the oddest of places.

<Two>
The center of the region the Romans labelled Liguria fell on the delta of
the Rhone River in southern France. Just before the Rhone splits into its
two main channels, a last straggling arm of the Luberon range, the Alpilles,
reaches westward, ending in a jumbled and rocky promontory a few miles from
the river. This protective line of hills forms the baseline of a triangle
with the upper lines created by the confluence of the Durrance and the Rhone.
Within this secure and fertile triangle, successive waves of ancient cultures
established their communities and towns.[8]

Neolithic farmers, the Ligurian ancestors, arrived early in the seventh
millennium BCE, and dwelt in Arcadian simplicity until Bronze Age trading
cultures, such as the Egyptian, Mycenaean, and most significantly the
Phoenician arrived in the second millennium. A thousand years later, Celtic
tribes began to filter down the river from their European homeland north
of Lake Geneva and conquered or integrated with the local cultures. Just
as this cultural upheaval was beginning, more than half a millennium before
the birth of Christ, Greek traders arrived and built a fortress at the
point where the Rhone forks. They called it Theline, but to the Romans
it became Arelate (from the Celtic Arlaith), or Arles in French.[9]

As the two communities, Greek and Ligurian, mixed and grew, a new and
larger city in the protected delta north of the Alpilles, near the present-day
town of Saint-Remy-de-Provence, was founded. Nestled in a narrow valley
to the north of its sacred mountain stood the ancient spiritual center
of Liguria, the city of Glanon, Romanized as Glanum Livii. Glanum's authority
throughout Liguria depended on its closeness with the shamanic priesthood
at Les Baux and in the Valley of the Ancients at Cordes. This closeness
would continue until Glanum’s eventual abandonment in the 4th
century CE, and beyond.[10]

Even as Arelate grew, after 49 BCE, into a smaller version of Rome, Glanum
adhered to its old ways, absorbing first the Greeks, then the Romans,
and then in the middle of the first century CE, an influx of Jews from
Palestine and other parts of the new Roman Empire. Some of these Jews
were followers of a rabble-rousing magician, Jesus the Nazorean, who had
just claimed the ancient throne of David in Jerusalem, and been executed
for treason by the Romans. The fleeing followers included, perhaps, members
of Jesus' immediate family. As they spread throughout the region preaching
their Gospel, the cultured and thoroughly Hellenized Ligurian philosophers
were also converted to the new faith. From this unique blend of spiritual
influences would grow an alternative version of what, a century or two
later, would be called Christianity.

The accretion of spiritual influences in the region began long before
the arrival of Christianity. The Egyptians of the 18th and 19th Dynasties
arrived more than a millennium before Glanum was founded at the foot of
its holy mountain. The Egyptians built trading forts off what was then
mouth of the Rhone, near the present day Ste. Maries-de-le-Mer, and traveled
up the Rhone as far as Lyons. The Phoenicians followed, bringing bronze
and an alphabet, and in the Greek era, trade flowed freely from Alexandria
by way of Massilia (Marseille).[11]

With the trade came a new influx of ideas and philosophies from the east.
In the late third century BCE, Buddhist missionaries arrived, dispatched
by King Asoka in India to preach the Eight-fold path to all the ends of
the earth. For the next three centuries, small enclaves of Buddhist hermits
could be found living in the ancient grottoes and caves of the region.
Hellenized statues of the Buddha have been unearthed in the caves near
Lamanon, and in at least one grotto reportedly used by Mary Magdalene,
north of Nimes.[12]

This unique overlapping of influences created the very cosmopolitan and
syncretic context from which the new faith, early Christianity, emerged.
It appeared suddenly and full blown with the fervour of a Jewish messianic
cult, the compassionate techniques of the early Buddhists, and an emphasis
on the Mother-Goddess that is pure paganism, recognizable all the way
back to the first Neolithic hunters. While Glanum held to its ancient
pagan beliefs almost to the very end, it was at Arles that the old Ligurian
paganism was most completely transformed into a unique version of the
new "Christianity."

When Hannibal crossed the Rhone at Ernaginum, a few miles west of Glanum
in 218 BCE, the Gallo-Greek settlement to the south that would become
Arles was already a trading post of some note. The earliest versions of
the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts suggest that they sailed west
from Argos, around the heel of Italy and through the Strait of Messina
to the mouth of the Rhone; then up the river, founding the trading center
of Theline at the head of the Rhone delta on their way to the land of
the Golden Fleece. This was located, according to proponents of this theory,
around the source of the Rhone at Lake Leman. Traces of this early Greek
exploration remain in the local Herakles legends, depicted on the very
Christian 12th century CE church of St. Trophime.[13]

Three hundred or so years after its founding, when the Romans arrived
in the first flush of their empire building, the Greeks of Theline were
cultured philosophers who had dwelt in peace so long they had virtually
forgotten the art of war. Rome saved them from the more barbaric tribes
of Celts sweeping down from the north, but at the price of their independence.
The Salian confederation of Greeks and Ligurians were defeated by the
Romans within a generation of their rescue and soon thereafter the entire
region was annexed as Rome's first province, the Provincia Narbonesis.
A century later, Augustus and Julius Caesar having made safe the roads
back to Rome, the first province, Provence, became the center-piece of
the transalpine empire.[14]

Under the Romans, Arelate retained its commercial status and flourished.
Its rapid rise can attributed to its siding with Julius Caesar against
Pompey in 49 BCE, for which it was rewarded amply. By the late first century
CE, Arles had also become an ecclesiastical center, a position it would
retain for the next millennium, partly on the strength of its legendary
cemetery, the Alyscamps, and its association with the early church and
its relics. Perhaps the most famous necropolis of the Dark Ages, the Alyscamps
(from Elisii Campi, or Elysian Fields), was built outside the city walls,
as were all Roman cemeteries, and along the Via Aurelia, the main road
to Italy and Rome. By the late first century CE, it was famous as a meeting
place for Christian mystics.

In 314 CE, Constantine came to Arles to swear before the Church council,
and on the Alyscamps’ relics, that the Christian God was his personal
protector. All of this attention made the Alyscamps famous, and it became
so desirable as a final resting place that bodies were shipped from all
over Europe for burial in its holy grounds. The twelfth-century Chronicle
of the Pseudo-Turpin informs us that the peers of Charlemagne, Roland,
and the other fallen heroes, were transported with great difficulty to
the Alyscamps.[15]

Arles therefore was the focal point for whatever version of "Christianity"
swept the region in those early years of the Common Era. We must be careful,
as the quotes around Christianity in the last sentence indicate, because
while this new spiritual collective would be later seen as distinctly
and uniquely Christian, it is not clear that this was so in its origins.
As we will see by looking at the survivals of an ancient paganism embedded
in the early layers of the new faith, this version of "Christianity"
drew heavily on the ancient traditions of Our Lady Underground or the
Goddess of the Springs, the Neolithic Mother-Goddess and her successors.

<Three>
The Neolithic Ligurians, from the scanty evidence of the Camonica valley
pictoglyphs, seem to have worshipped a mysterious Mother-Goddess of the
kind described by anthropologists such as Marija Gambustas.[16]
Part of this larger complex of beliefs was the tradition of the Mother-Goddess
as the animating spirit of grottoes and sacred wells or springs. Our Lady
Underground, a common label given to the Black Madonnas so popular in the
12th and 13th centuries CE, derives from these ancient
Mother-Goddess traditions.

The Ligurians of Provence also worshipped
a version of Our Lady Underground. This was first Hellenized then Romanized
into a local cult of Diana as patroness of the springs, or the nympheum.
Remains of these temples can be found in the temple of Diana at Nimes
and at the very ancient nympheum of Glanum, but the traditions associated
with the worship of Our Lady Underground all but disappeared as she merged
during the early Christian era into the Virgin Mary.[17]

Curiously enough, it is the name, Mary, which provides us with the broader
connection. The last of the ancient Neolithic people to be overwhelmed
by the eastern cultures, in this case Rome in the late third century,
were the Basques of the southwestern coast of France and northern Spain.
In Basque folklore there survived prominent traces of the Neolithic goddess
religion. The pagan Basques worshiped the natural world; they thought
of the sky as a kind of thunder god, Ortzia, and the earth was a mother
goddess known as Mari.

This rather shadowy figure, usually conceived as a tall, beautiful and
kindly woman with some kind of magical or semi-divine powers, is familiar
even today from one end of the Pyrenees to the other, from the White Lady
of Chateau Puivert near Rennes-le-Chateau to the Virgin of Lourdes. Mari
is associated with certain locations such as the grottos and springs under
La Rhune, the sacred mountain of the Basque, and anthropologists have
seen her as a continuation of the ancient pagan mother-goddesses once
associated with those locations. Mari's associations with the sacred and
secret places in the geography of the Basque country as well as her association
with spinning, springs, grottos and megalithic monuments, mark her as
a unique preservation of the ancient European goddess figure.[18]

But the name itself is Semitic in origin. To the Egyptians, Bronze Age
Cyprus was known as Ay-mari or the land of Mari, because of the island’s
devotion to the ancient goddess. And the name Mari appears in the most
unexpected places. Ma-ri in Sumerian means fruitful mother. There is a
city of Mari on the Euphrates and the Hebrew name Miryam, which is the
origin of Maria, is a contraction of Marat-Hayam - Lady of the Sea. Why
these names appear among the Basques, of all people, is anyone’s
guess. It points perhaps to a very old connection, those Phoenician traders
again, between all the peoples around the Mediterranean. It might also
explain why the name Maria occupies a prominent position in Christian
mythology, and why St. Jerome called the Virgin Stella Maris - Star of
the Sea.[19]

We do not know if the ancient Ligurians also called the goddess of the
underground springs Mari, but it seems likely given the early and rapid
change over in the attributions of certain sacred sites to the Virgin
Mary, the mother figure of Christianity. By the early third century CE,
as Christianity became the Imperial faith, the sacred grottos and springs
across Provence changed their patroness, adopting the new version of the
Mother of God in place of the older Mother-Goddess. That their names were
perhaps the same can only have helped the transition.

While the nypheum at Nimes became a very classical shrine to Diana, at
Glanum the nypheum retained its ancient essence. Located at the foot of
its sacred mountain, the spring was already old, enclosed by massive ashlars
and provided with broad stones steps leading down to the sacred pool,
when Glanum was founded in the 6th century BCE. Facing east
across the sacred pool was a terraced sanctuary to the Ligurian Sun-God,
complete with kneeling heroes and elaborately carved skulls, and a massive
stone rampart enclosed the sacred complex of sun temple and spring. The
Greeks rebuilt the ramparts, adding an impressive gate leading from the
new town to its sacred center, and repaired the ancient and deeply worn
stone steps of the spring.[20]

Even the Romans, who added to the town substantially, left the sacred
center virtually undisturbed. One curious early Roman addition, dating
from the first century BCE, is a large stone near the nympheum with a
worn image of a goddess, or the patroness, above the letters DM. This
became in Christian usage the Deus Magnus, or Great God, but before that
it was Dea Matrona, or the Mother-Goddess, to the Romans. And perhaps
to the anonymous patroness who had the stone carved, it meant Dea Mari,
the Goddess Mari, the Neolithic Our Lady Underground.[21]

Glanum also had other, more exotic connections to the Mother Goddess.
In the late first century BCE, a part of a private dwelling was converted
to a shrine to Cybele, the Anatolian Great Mother of the Gods brought
to Rome in the form of her mystereion, a black meteorite stone,
at the height of the Second Punic War in 204 BCE. The presence of this
shrine, and its related "mystery school," suggests that at Glanum
there existed a deeper and older aspect of the ancient Goddess, one that
later fragmented into individual, and some times mutually contradictory,
forms.

The worship of the Mother of the Gods was common to all the ancient traditions
of Europe and the Middle East. The cult of Cybele, however, developed
into what almost certainly was the first "mystery school," and
as such traveled from Anatolia to Rome and on to Provence. The major temples
of the "mystery" of the Mother Stone of the Gods were located
on the island of Samothrace, off the coast of Lydia in Asia Minor, Memphis
in Egypt, Thebes in Greece, and at Nimes in Provence. The oldest and most
important center remained at Pessinus on Mount Dindymus, where the cubic
stone, the mystereion that contained the essence of the goddess,
was kept.[22]

The stone remained in the temple of Cybele on Mount Dindymus until the turn
of the third century BCE. The tale of how the stone that fell from heaven
became the stone of exile, to use Wolfram’s pun, was one of the grand
yarns of the ancient world. In the depths of the Second Punic War, with
Hannibal and his elephants rampaging at will on the Italian Peninsula, the
Roman Senate lost faith in its gods. As they were tribal deities from Latinum
and Etruscia with Greek glosses, they seemed unhelpful and insignificant
in the face of the threat posed by the international power of the Carthaginians.
The Roman Senate decided to fall back on that "old-time religion,"
the worship of the Mother of the Gods.[23]

Consultation of the Sibylline Books guided the Romans to seek aid from
the same Great Mother known to their reputed ancestors of Trojan fame.
The Delphic oracle agreed that it was time for Cybele to come to Rome.
The king of Pergamus, under whose control the temple and stone at Pessinus
lay, was not so enthusiastic. It took an earthquake and a comet or a brilliant
meteor shower to convince him. Accompanied by the Gallae, the priestesses
of the shrine, the stone departed by ship for Rome. Miracles occurred
along the way, including an interval of divine navigation and an escort
of dolphins. The noblest lady of Rome, Claudia Quinta, personally welcomed
the entourage of Cybele at Ostia and pulled the ship ashore when it grounded
on a sandbar with her own virtuous strength, an episode considered to
be another miraculous sign.[24]

At Rome, the Mother of the Gods was appropriately housed in the temple
of Victoria, an echo of the shrine to Nike, victory, on Samothrace, in
the five hundred fiftieth year after Rome's semi mythical founding. From
distant Phrygia came her essence, the silver-and-black meteoric stone
from the starry heavens, with a conclave of the Galli, male-born priestesses
whose order had served the goddess for millennia. Rome initiated a thirteen-year
construction plan to honor Cybele with a worthy Temple on the Palatine
Hill. From Claudia's own lineage would come many of Rome's greatest, including
Julius Caesar, as the fortunes of Hannibal, and Carthage itself, withered
like a dying branch.

The temple was called the Matreum, and the worship of the new civic goddess,
the Magna Mater or simply Matrona, spread rapidly throughout the Empire,
blending along the way all the older forms of the Great Goddess. The stone
remained in its domed temple until at least the mid fourth century when
Julian the Apostate wrote a hymn dedicated to it and the goddess.

Who is then the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the
intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods:
she is both the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; She came into being
next to and together with the great Creator; She is in control of every
form of life, and the Cause of all generation; She easily brings to perfection
all things that are made. Without pain She brings to birth . . . She is
the Motherless Maiden, enthroned at the very side of Zeus, and in very
truth is the Mother of All the Gods. . . .[25]

Compare this to the anonymous fifth-century hymn to Mary:

And we will write now the praises of Our Lady, and Mother of
God, the Virgin Mary. . . . Thou shalt be named the Beloved. . . . Thou
art the pure chest of gold in which was laid up the manna, that bread
that comes down from heaven, and the Giver of Life to all the world. .
. . Thou art the treasure which Joseph purchased, and found therein the
precious Pearl. . . . Thou hast become the throne of the King whom the
Cherubim do bear. . . . All the kings of the earth shall come to thy light,
and the people to thy brightness, O Virgin Mary.[26]

Should we then consider the veneration of Mary as the Mother of God to be
an extension of the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother? The answer seems to
be yes, and Christian tradition appears to agree. After the Crucifixion,
Mary was reported to have traveled to Ephesus in Asia Minor where she died
and was buried. As we know from the Acts of the Apostles, Ephesus was the
center of the cult of Artemis, the Roman Diana, as the Great Mother. After
preaching against the temple, Saint Paul was accosted by a silversmith who
declared: "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Yet it is in Ephesus
that Mary was first officially declared theotokos, or Mother of
God, in 431 C.E.[27]

As the Church labored
on into the Dark Ages, the ancient statutes and shrines of Our Lady were
dedicated to the Virgin. The most sacred and venerated of these statues
depicted the Mother Goddess as black, echoing the stone itself, and they
became the Black Virgins. Their sacred sites and shrines are in the same
places: springs and wells, caves on mountaintops, and grottos of all kinds.
The Black Madonna of Lyons is enshrined on a hilltop in a church built
from the ruins of the former temple to Cybele, a case of direct transfer
still visible to the modern tourist. The crypts of many Gothic cathedrals,
including Chartres, retained their Black Madonnas and shrines to Matrona.
The Black Virgin of Chartres, Our Lady Underground, is still there. All
of these cave sanctuaries echo the caves, grottos, and caverns that riddle
Mount Dindymus in Phrygia.[28]

Glanum also echoes this arrangement of sacred mountain, grottos and springs,
and The Goddess of the Springs remains a vital element in the folk life
of the region, although for the most part completely subsumed into a Christian
framework. Each village was built around a nypheum and a spring, and even
now every village has its spring and fountain, along with its church and
forum like central-square. In St. Remy, just a kilometre north of Glanum,
the mother-goddess, in her latest form as the Madonna and Child, watches
over every major intersection. Whether She is seen as the Mother-Goddess
or the Mother of God, Her presence is still felt.[29]

<Four>
By the 8th century CE, as Europe began to pull itself together
after the fall of Rome and the invasions of barbarians tribes from the
east, the cults of the Mother-Goddess had been almost completely absorbed
into the new cult of the Virgin Mother. Glanum disappeared at the beginning
of the fourth century, and, while Arles retained its importance into the
late medieval era, the significance of the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary,
faded into the background of folk tradition.

Arles favoured the local Sun Hero/messiah figure, Hellenized as Herakles.
But just a few miles north, near another ancient Ligurian city, the local
folk tradition retained a vivid glimpse of a curious confrontation between
the old pagan beliefs and the new faith. In the legends of St. Martha,
the sister of Mary Magdalene who travelled to France with her, we find
the point of overlap between old and new; perhaps even the exact spot
where the conversion of the local pagans began.

Although the tales weren’t written down until the 12th
century CE, when they were collected as part of the newly emerging Magdalene
legend,[30] they reflect an ancient local
tradition that goes back, apparently, to the Neolithic Ligurians. At least
two hundred years before Hannibal forced his way across the Rhone nearby,
a small town of boatmen and marsh dwellers had formed. Called Ernaginum
by the Romans, a name that reflects a Celtic or Indo-European origin derived
from, perhaps, ur-naga, or primeval serpent, the locality seems,
from early on, to have had a connection to dragons. This suggests that
the local cult was the Lady of the Serpents, common to both the Neolithic
Ligurians and the later Celtic tribes. Examples have been found in various
places from La Tene in Switzerland to southern France, so we are on safe
ground supposing that the dragon of Ernaginum was of this type.[31]

However it was to Ernaginum that Martha, Mary Magdalene’s sister,
headed to begin her ministry. We are told in the 12th century
Vita Biographica Marie Magdalene, the VBMM,[32]
that the region was "a wilderness of fierce and venomous reptiles,"
located "between infertile groves and the gravel of the river bank."
This is so curious, in and of itself, as to require an explanation. We
are not given one, and indeed the Magdalene legends that include Martha’s
miracles are all strangely silent on the point.

Ernaginum, instead of an infertile wilderness, was an important city
on the Via Aurelia linking Arles, and points to the west on the Via Domitia,
with Rome. The Romans had built a fort on an island in the Rhone, which
increased Ernaginum’s significance. This was no backwater town,
but a key defensive position for the region, and perhaps also a center
of the local paganism. The cult of the dragon had classical as well as
Neolithic roots, and, as can be seen from the mosaics found at Arles,
this one was at least linguistically connected to the dragon that guarded
the sacred cauldron of Medea, the Nerlac.[33]

We can then see the choice of Martha as one of "sending in the big
guns." Martha, as Mary’s sister and possibly the sister-in-law
of Jesus, was the most spiritually advanced, save the Magdalene, of the
disciples in Gaul, and so she was dispatched to demonstrate the power
of the new faith to the most unrepentant of pagans, the dragon worshiping
people of Ernagium. If they could be converted, then the whole region
would be impressed. While this is not explicitly expressed in the surviving
versions of the legend, it is certainly the subtext of the encounter.

Martha arrives, as we are told in the VBMM, during a market day or festival
to propitiate the dragon, at least everyone is talking about it, and begins
to preach. They immediately challenge her: If her new god was so powerful,
why not take on the dragon? Martha agrees to the test and with the whole
town following her, proceeds to the dragon’s lair, where she subdues
it with the sign of the cross. She binds it with her girdle, and invites
the fearful townspeople to tear it to pieces, which they do with gusto.
For this feat, we are told in the VBMM, the entire province converted
to Christianity.[34]

The VBMM goes on to state that before Martha’s subjugation of
the dragon, the region was called niger focus, which can be translated
as the "heart of darkness." It became Tarascon, based on the name of the
Dragon, the Tarascus. This is very curious. The Golden Legend, a re-working
of the same material a century later, referred to it as Nerluc, id
est niger locus, or "Nerluc, it is the place of darkness."
The VBMM down plays the connection, drawn by the author of the Golden
Legend, to the legend of Medea and her guardian dragon. The idea that
is substituted is equally odd, but based on the long lasting tradition
of the local name, Tarascon.

The Golden Legend tells us that the monster, a winged half serpent half
lion, came from Gallicia and was the offspring of the two ancient world
serpents, Leviathan and Onacho, the Mesopotamian Oannes. This certainly
matches the concept of a primeval serpent, and in the late mix of Greco-Roman
mythologies we do find a sea serpent son of Neptune called Taras. Curiously
enough, this was also one of the names of the Minotaur, in the Greek form
of Tauriskos, who was also considered to be a child of Poseidon, or Neptune.[36]

Whatever lay in the "heart of darkness," once it was expelled,
Martha claimed the region as her own. The VBMM goes to state that she
founded her own establishment there, filled with virtues and miracles,
and has protected the region ever since. It also tells us that on January
17th, the date of Lazarus’ resurrection from the dead,
in a year that must have been before 60 CE, a spontaneous gathering of
the elite of the Christian community happened at Martha’s establishment.
At this gathering, according to the VBMM, a miracle of water changing
to wine occurred, echoing the marriage at Cana. The gathered elders then
declared that January 17th would be remembered for this miracle and the
founding of the church or chapel where it took place.[37]

In the middle ages, this site would be located at the new 12th
century church dedicated to St. Martha in Tarascon. But Tarascon didn’t
exist until after the destruction of Ernaginum by the Vandals in 480 CE,
so a site chosen there in the 12th century is obviously incorrect.
But apparently, someone remembered.
All that remains today of Ernaginum is a Romanesque chapel to the angel
of the Annunciation and the Apocalypse, St. Gabriel. This enigmatic chapel,
preserved and maintained despite its isolation, focused, as can be seen
in the relief carvings of its western front, on the Archangel Gabriel
as the harbinger of salvation. By adding a Daniel in the lion’s
den scene, it also suggests that salvation’s foreshadowing in the
Old Testament. The overall sense of the chapel is of a monument to angelic
intervention in human affairs, a curious theological point to be expressed
in such a manner, one that is virtually unique in western art.

The St. Gabriel Chapel points to many mysteries, and supplies
very few answers. The exact date of the chapel’s construction is
unknown but can be no later than the last half of the 12th
century. The western front was designed to be reminiscent of a late Roman
sarcophagus, and the crude relief work suggests a Dark Age origin. It
possible that the chapel preserves in a fashion an original structure,
dating perhaps to the fourth or fifth century CE, as it seems obvious
that the gabled arch and tymphanum date from an earlier period than the
12th century over-gabling portico. Why it was built, and why
it was so carefully restored and maintained, remains officially unknown.

However, this curious chapel at the original site of Ernaginum is the
only choice for Martha’s establishment, and this connection, kept
alive through certain local families, would account for its preservation
and conservation. If that is correct, and it seems almost certain, then
the chapel is also the first mystery school of the new faith in Gaul.
It attained its new, although private, notoriety at almost the same time
that the new legends of Mary Magdalene and Martha were being written and
circulated. This is not likely to have been a coincidence, and between
the two we catch a brief glimpse of a community attempting to hide a secret
in plain sight, while obscuring the connections so that only someone who
knew the secret already could follow the meaning.

From our perspective, with the aid of archaeology and anthropology,
we can reconstruct the thread of meaning. The ancient dragon cult, Our
Lady of the Snakes, was a component of the Mother-Goddess, one that had
power over the forces of death, as well as knowledge of magical plants,
and the keeping of the elixir of life, as in Medea’s cauldron. Martha
overcame the dragon, and gained, as the VBMM goes on to relate, the ability
to raise the dead, and, equally significant, to change water into wine.[40]

This, as Leland informs us, is one of the gifts of Aradia, the Goddess
of the Witches, in her form as Queen of the Snakes. Aradia is the daughter
of Diana and Apollo, her son/brother/father, which is to say the Sun God
and the Moon Goddess. In late Italian witchcraft, the ancient Snake Goddess
became the model for the Diana of the Witches, echoing a connection between
serpents, the moon and feminine energy that is as old as mankind. Her
daughter Aradia (Herodias in Greek) combines these qualities, but is seen
as a human, a semi-divine being who took on human form for the sake of
the oppressed and down trodden, according to Leland’s sources.[41]

The curious legend of Martha and the Tarasque, and the foundation of
a teaching school marked by the sign of Aradia/The Lady of the Snakes’
grace, the ability to change water into wine, leaves us wondering just
exactly how "Christian" this form of the new religion actually
was. Perhaps at the very core of the movement in France in the first century
CE was the direct absorption of these traditions into the most basic level
of the tradition. That "Christianity" was originally a Goddess
religion, perhaps even with a female, Aradia-like messiah figure, would
have been a powerful secret to have in the medieval era.[42]

Those who knew that secret in the late 12th century were well
on their way to becoming heretics. Instead of allowing the ancient traditions
of an early and distinctly un-Roman Christianity, heavily flavoured by
the Old Time Religion of the Neolithic Mother-Goddess, to become occult
and marginalized, the basic instinct toward absorbing spiritual components
of the region kicked in and produced a popular version of Christianity
that drew directly on all of these elements. By the turn of the 13th
century, Provence was a hot bed of Troubadours and Cathars, and by the
end of the century, after the Church’s crusade against the heretics,
much of it lay in ruins.[43]

By then, whatever miracle it was that happened in Ernaginum in the middle
of the first century had long been forgotten, except in the local folk
traditions. In Tarascon, according to Sabine Baring-Gould’s voluminous
Lives of the Saints, the festival of the dragon continued into
the late 19th century.

The dragon was conducted by a girl in white and blue, who led
it by her girdle of blue silk, and when the dragon was especially unruly,
dashed holy water over it. The effigy of the dragon now reposes in the
lumber room of the theatre.[44]

[12] The statues are in the Musee Borely in Marseille
and were found in the 1920s and 1930s in the caves near Salon-de-Provence,
in the hills north of Marseille. Otto Rahn, in his 1933 Kreuzzug gegen
den Gral (published in Freiburg), reports the find in 1930 of a Ligurian-Greek
Buddhaís head in a burial chamber near Nimes. For a discussion
of the possible Buddhist influences on early Christianity, see Elmar R.
Gruber and Holger Kerstenís The Original Jesus: The Buddhist
Sources of Christianity, Elements Books, London, 1995.

[30] See Jacopo de Voragine, The Golden Legends,
trans. William Caxton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914) for the
basic version of the Magdalene legend. See also Etienne-Michel Faillon.
The Life of Mary Magdalene and of her Sister Saint Martha. Trans.
David Mycoff. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989 and Susan Haskins.
Mary Magdalene. Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1993.